Israeli and American Jewish officials active on behalf of Ethiopian Jewry had no comment today on reports over the weekend that at least 2,000 Ethiopian Jews have died in refugee camps in the eastern Sudan since they began to flee their homeland last spring.
The reports, carried in The New York Times, quoted Sudanese officials and relief workers as estimating that beyond the hundreds who have perished in the Sudan, perhaps 2,000 more are stranded in the Sudan since Israel was forced to cease its airlift of thousands of Ethiopian Jews earlier this month after premature disclosure of the operation appeared in the Israeli and international media. Israel confirmed reports of the airlift.
The report in the Times, from Gedaref, the Sudan, said that at one camp, Umm Rekuba, nearly 1,800 of the 7,000 Ethiopian Jews who arrived last year died there, many of measles, according to Sudanese officials and relief workers. They were quoted as saying that in July and August of last year, the camp went without food or water for three weeks.
Relief workers were reported to say the Ethiopian Jews who began to flock into Sudanese camps in large numbers last spring and early summer, were in the “worst state of any of the refugees.”
A relief worker said that at his camp in eastern Sudan, the death rate of Ethiopian Jews was the highest of any refugee group — about 15 a day during the summer, according to the Times. The report said some 2,000 Jews are reported to be camped near the Sudanese-Ethiopian border, where the Sudanese officials are preventing entry.
The Times report said that according to records at the Umm Rekuba camp, some 50 miles from the border, 1,191 Ethiopian Jews died between July and November of last year. More than 600 died in the months before July. A nurse from the Sudan Council of Churches told the Times that the Ethiopian Jews, after their arduous trek to the border, arrived with dysentery, malaria, dehydration, typhoid and other ailments.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has learned independently that the continuing death of Ethiopian Jews in the Sudanese refugee camps had been Known to Jewish officials both here and in Israel for several months, and served as a catalyst in Israel’s efforts to airlift Ethiopian Jews to the Jewish State.
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